What to do about Al-Qaeda

Al-Qaeda seems to be like a balloon: you squeeze one point and it bulges out at another. So why are we still pushing in Afghanistan? It seems that the organization mostly relocated to Yemen and is operating from there. My guess is that if we push there they will pop up in Somalia.

It is quite obvious that we can’t push hard everywhere at the same time – we don’t have enough resources for that. It is also not productive: playing a game of “smack the gopher” is just a waste of time, money and human lives.

The first question is: what can we do to disable the Islamist terrorists? The second: are our current efforts doing us any good at reducing the terrorist threat?

To answer the easy one first: apparently right now we are NOT doing the right thing. Judging by the constant, and increasing, attempts to harm us we are not pressuring the terrorists. It is not enough to be defensive (even if the defense is effective, which ours isn’t). Defense doesn’t win wars, only offense does.

Let’s take a look at what we are doing:

1. Intelligence gathering - The US collects huge amounts of information. It comes from both human and machine sources (satellite images, telephone intercepts, etc.). Some of the information leads to direct action, like the attack on a terrorist gathering in Yemen where several Al-Qaeda leaders may have been killed. Some is ignored – the Nigerian Christmas bomber was one of those.

2. Military activity in Iraq - For a long time Iraq seemed to serve as a flytrap for terrorists: the faithful flocked there to fight the US forces and left the rest of us alone. With the Iraqis mostly running the show the flytrap doesn’t seem to work anymore. This doesn’t mean that we need to pull out of Iraq. President Obama is eager to get out of there, but that would be a serious mistake. Iraq is not really stable and Iran will step in as soon as it feels it’s safe to do so. (We will get back to Iran in a moment.)

3. Military activity and nation-building in Afghanistan - When the Bush administration attacked the Taliban after 9/11 it had a good reason to do so. The Taliban were sheltering Al-Qaeda and providing it with a safe operational environment. The US didn’t need to spend significant resources on toppling the Taliban – local forces did most of the heavy lifting. What we are doing there currently is of dubious value. Afghanistan will not become a nation state any time soon and completely uprooting Islamists from there is probably impossible. Therefore a victory in the simple terms of defeating the enemy, whoever the enemy may be, is impossible. Especially if we are not clear about who is the enemy. It seems that at the present time our effort in Afghanistan is mostly a waste of resources and American lives.

The above is a short and very incomplete summary. There is not enough space here to mention everything we are doing, even if knew everything.

The first question was: what can we do to disable the Islamist terrorists? This is not an easy one, but here is my best effort:

1. Keeping with the balloon analogy, we need to keep squeezing. We don’t have to squeeze as hard as we do in Afghanistan. Squeeze just enough to make life hard for the terrorists, prevent them from operating in the open and settling down. The attack in Yemen is a good example of such a policy. We can do the same or nearly the same in Afghanistan (as we did in the past) to keep them off balance and in hiding. We can save a lot of resources by getting most of our forces from out of that country. The smart thing would be to redirec those resources into building up a good human intelligence base. This is the only tool that will enable targeting the Al-Qaeda leadership – and it’s the leadership that matters.

For this policy to be effective we need to discard some of our squeamishness and political correctness. For example: the Institute for Arab Language Studies in Yemen is a known training ground for terrorists. It should have been visited by a couple of missiles a while ago. Instead we do nothing and then are surprised that a Nigerian citizen who spent some time there attempts to detonate a bomb on a Detroit-bound flight.

2. Let's we look at our balloon and see what keeps it pumped up. Not surprisingly, it is mostly money. Al-Qaeda, like every other terror organization needs money to survive. Cutting off its sources of financing will deflate the balloon. How can we do that?

Financing for Al-Qaeda comes from many sources. It would be impossible to cut off all of them, but we can cut off the major ones. Here is where we come back to Iran. It is a major source of financing for a number of terror organizations: Hizbulla, Hamas, Al-Qaeda and a couple of smaller ones. It also provides a lot of the technical know-how to these terrorists. Cut off this help and suddenly the balloon is half-deflated.

The other sources are not as easy: Saudi Arabia, despite all the denials, is a major source of money, as are Muslim charities all around the world. Something can be done though. All that money has to go through banks. If the US devoted only a fraction of the effort it puts in to catching tax evaders with foreign bank accounts to stopping the money flow to terrorists we would be able to deflate the balloon almost completely.

3. There are secondary but important things we can do: devote some resources to bringing down Islamist web sites. It is really not that difficult and would both reduce their recruiting ability and seriously damage their communications network.

There is more I have to say, but this is getting long and I will continue later.